Billy Joel is mourning the relatives on his father’s side whom he never had the chance to meet.
The “Piano Man” singer, who is Jewish, learned about the harrowing effect that World War II had on his family tree after meeting his half-brother during a visit to Vienna in his late 20s. Before their meeting, Joel didn’t know much about his father, Howard, or his history.
“He fought in the U.S. Army under General Patton,” Joel said in HBO Max’s new two-part documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. “They liberated Dachau. I tried to get him to talk about it, but he didn’t really want to talk about his past. I heard most of it from my brother. And then I found out about my father’s family. They were hunted.”
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It was through their connection that Joel discovered that many members of their family had been sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and that most of them were killed.
“I visited the graveyard where the Joel family’s buried, and I didn’t even know I had that many relatives,” the musician said. “There is an underlying rage that comes out sometimes — ‘What are you getting all mad about? Nobody did anything to you.’ But they wiped out my family. I would’ve liked to have known some of these people.”
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Earlier in the documentary, Joel said his paternal grandfather, Karl Amson Joel, ran a successful fashion business called Joel Macht Fabrik in Nuremberg in the lead-up to the war.
“They were forced to sell the business for nothing — pennies on the dollar — to a guy named Neckermann, but Neckermann never paid,” Joel recalled. “My grandfather was asking what he should do to get the money and he got a message, ‘We’ll settle the account.’ He was warned at the last minute, ‘Watch out. They’re gonna kill you.'”
His grandparents were able to safely flee Germany. “My grandfather realized, ‘This is it. I better leave while I can,'” he said. “And he was lucky — they got to go across the Swiss border, which was difficult for a lot of people.”
Joel continued, “If my grandparents had been found on the train with the documents that said Jew, they would’ve been sent immediately to a concentration camp. They got out. A miracle.”
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Joel added, “The ironic thing is, when Neckermann took over the business, they actually started to manufacture the striped pajamas that the prisoners in the concentration camps had to wear. That was made by Joel Macht Fabrik.”
Billy Joel: And So It Goes is streaming now in full on HBO Max.
